Installation at Kew went smoothly.

Awesome. The perfect new home for Hive.

Lead Partner:

Total immersion. A powerful message.

Challenge accepted.

The Hive was a completely ground-breaking and inspiring approach to British creativity. Designed by award-winning British artist Wolfgang Buttress – and inspired by the research of physicist and bee expert Dr Martin Bencsik – it was initially created for the 2015 Milan Expo to draw attention to the issues of food security and biodiversity.

Featured Content Section

Incredibly, The Hive’s soundscape composition from 40,000 bees and 12 musicians got signed to a record label. Shooting to #11 in the vinyl music charts.

Kew the music

Challenge

Constructed reality.

Highlighting the crucial role of pollination by bees, 32 horizontal stacked layers of hexagonal aluminium twist together to suggest a swarm of bees. The sculpture is a 14 metre cube raised up on columns so it almost seems to hover.

Our experts were tasked with designing an audiovisual system that would transport people into this ‘live’ beehive – immersing them in a unique space to provide a powerful environmental message.

Client: Wolfgang Buttress + UK TI

Architect: BDP

Approach

Surround sound.

The system we designed moves sound around visitors, with a 360° arrangement of carefully placed loudspeakers that sit inside the pavilion’s structure. Six sub-bass loudspeakers relay sounds in direct response to the behaviours of honey bees located in Nottingham, changing throughout the day and night.

Accelerometers (vibration sensors) are also used to measure the activity – feeding real-time signals to an LED light array inside to create visual effects.

Technical impact

Layered complexity.

To achieve such an ambitious technical challenge, our Audiovisual team designed a distributed soundscape system installation. This is integrated into the sculpture via a high-quality active loudspeaker system architecture, driven by a central show controller, and user-interface is provided via authenticated touch screens.

The 360° immersive sound field had 3D space panning, and featured upper and lower rings of compact, integrated mid/high frequency loudspeaker units, plus subwoofers around the glass floor.

Human impact

Award winning.

We worked closely with all parties to create this immersive experience that won Best Pavilion Architecture at the Milan Expo. Now that this fantastic project sits in Kew Gardens, the installation has driven unprecedented visitor numbers and has become a long-term artistic and educational feature within the gardens.

This is an ever-evolving and multi-faceted project that provides a truly immersive experience through the power of digital connectivity.

Key Figures

32 horizontal stacked layers of hexagonal aluminium

360° soundscape broadcasts the sound of live bees

14m Cube with an environmental and political message

Featured Content Section

Hoare Lea is an absolute pleasure to work with both professionally and personally. What the team helped create for the ever evolving 3D soundscape was, and is, very special.

Footer

Contact us

Stay up to date

Sign up to our mailing list

Email

Tick to accept the Terms & Conditions and to consent to receiving marketing communications and the latest news from Hoare Lea. Please check this box to confirm you accept the terms and conditions and consent to email marketing.